The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century

by Michael N Forster

  Hegel, however, also thought that dualism was at the root, or at least a key component, of the Christian disparagement of the body. Dualism, he thought (§225), leads to embarrassment about our natural bodily functions and to the view that “it is in them that the enemy reveals himself in his characteristic shape.” I am not so sure. Specifically, I’m not sure if any thoroughgoing materialist would or should feel any less shame than a dualist would at what we now take to be shame worthy bodily functions. For example, materialist or dualist, one should be ashamed of, say, pedophilic actions. If anything, it would seem that thinking of the body as the not-self would make one less ashamed of its movements. It was, after all, a bodily urge, one might say in explanation of a purported shameful act, and thus not representative of who I really am. Of course, if one accepts a religious doctrine that disparages the body, then that doctrine might lead you to be at war with certain aspects of your bodily self. However, this would seem to result entirely from the doctrine’s demotion of the body rather than its promotion of dualism. Indeed, it might even be that, rather than mind–body dualism leading to desecrating the body, it is the desecration of the body that makes one distance oneself from one’s body and thus leads to mind–body dualism.

  18.4 THE MATERIALISMUSSTREIT

  In September of 1854, 23 years after Hegel died, the prominent Göttingen physiologist Rudolph Wagner presented a general lecture before the Association of German Scientists and Physicians. In this lecture, he condemned the zoologist Carl Vogt’s materialistic stance on the soul and the origin of human beings. The ensuing intellectual melee over the relative roles of religion and science in our understanding of the world, what came to be known as the Materialismusstreit, or the controversy over materialism, touched virtually all aspects of German society, affecting science, politics, religion, morality, education, even the food people chose to eat, and in many ways prefigured the schism we find today at the root of some of our thorniest political battles: abortion, gay marriage, cloning, and contraception.16

  Materialism had been gaining popularity among German academics through the views of the philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, who had studied with Hegel and, with the aim of, as he put it, “plunging into the direct opposite,” also went on to study anatomy.17 However, the central players in the Materialismusstreit, which took place in the public eye, were scientists, such as Vogt, who, among other things, had a flair for rhetoric. In his Physiologische Briefe (Letters on Physiology), Vogt claimed that all mental processes “are but functions of the brain substance or, to express myself a bit crudely here, that thoughts stand in the same relation to the brain as gall does to the liver or urine to the kidneys.” Though today many materialists hold precisely Vogt’s view that mental processes are functions of the brain (though they would likely quibble with his analogy, seeing it as having too much in common with dualism, as it makes mental processes out as something secreted by and thus separate from the functioning of the brain), at the time it was considered scandalous and was the subject of much ridicule. Vogt, however, remained undaunted, seeing his materialistic understanding of the mind as following directly from his scientific investigations of the brain and his experiments on animals; “to assume a soul that makes use of the brain as an instrument with which it can work as it pleases,” Vogt said, “is pure nonsense.”

  Wagner, on the other hand, was inclined to think that Vogt’s materialism was actually worse than pure nonsense, for as he saw it, it was dangerous nonsense.18 Though Wagner was also a scientist, he held that there were certain limits to what science can and should investigate.19 Not only was materialism not grounded in empirical evidence, according to Wagner, but it also presented a serious threat to the moral and political order. There is no reason, Wagner argued, why a religious conception of the origin of human life on earth and the immortality of the soul cannot be upheld consistently with a scientific picture of the world. On Wagner’s (1854) view, the realms of science and spirituality have nothing to say to one another: “reason and belief are just as different from one another,…as the senses, as vision and hearing”(pp. 18, 14f.). To accept the picture Vogt paints of the natural world, Wagner said, “would completely destroy the moral foundations of social order” and thus it is our “duty to the nation” to reject it.20

  The debate brought others into the fray and over the next two decades, the schism grew ever more virulent and vitriolic. For example, the physiologist and physician Ludwig Büchner, in his popular and provocative Force and Matter, argued that “atheism, or philosophical Monism, alone leads to freedom, to intelligence, to progress, to due recognition of a man—in a word, to Humanism.”21 And Andreas Wagner (no relation to Rudolph Wagner) defended the other side, calling Vogt a conniving deceiver and arguing that the history of science provides no reason to think that the posits of science and religion cannot be consistently upheld. Materialism, rather than following from science, according to Andreas Wagner, “belongs to the diseased phenomena of our time which have resulted from the displacement of the Christian standpoint and have gripped all classes of civil society like an influenza.”22

  Part of the interest in this debate, and no doubt part of the reason why it captivated the public at large, has to do with the personalities involved. None of the central players were overflowing with that virtue we call “modesty,” and all had consummate command of invectives. However, there is quite a bit of philosophical interest as well; for debates arose about the existence of God, the nature of consciousness, the limits of scientific knowledge, the respective roles and importance of sense experience and rational thought in our understanding of the world, the reduction of chemistry, biology, and physiology to physics, the origin of morality, the existence of free will, and the epistemic status of faith. The sine qua non of the materialist position, however, during this time was atheism; there is nothing beyond this world, was the cry, and what science cannot capture, must be relegated to a figment of the imagination. “The world is not the realization of a unitary creative mind, but rather a complex of things and fact,” Büchner said, and “we must recognize it as it is, not as we would like to imagine it.”23 The loser on this picture, as we will see, was free will, yet consciousness, if not the entire triad of mind, meaning, and morality, was seen as amenable to a complete scientific explanation, and thus preserved, as materialists saw it.

  Vogt, no doubt, thought that he was salvaging the mind, and in particular, consciousness, by identifying mental processes with functions of the brain. Pointing to what we today call the “explanatory gap” between mind and brain, his opponents ridiculed his approach. Their criticism is brought out perhaps most acutely by the philosopher Hermann Lotze. Lotze wanted to know how, on a materialistic picture of the universe according to which all of nature is ultimately mechanical movements of extended substance, could consciousness exist? If the workings of the brain are no different in essence from the workings of a spinning-jenny, he asked, are we to then say that a spinning-jenny is conscious?

  The physician Heinrich Czolbe, a lesser known, though in Lotze’s eyes more consistent materialist, took Lotze’s comments to heart, leading him to diverge from the other materialists. Czolbe admitted that Lotze had rightly identified an unbridgeable gap between a mechanical description of consciousness and one’s own experience of consciousness and responded by reducing human consciousness to fundamental consciousness in nature, propounding what might be seen as panpsychism.24 To the question of whether a spinning-jenny is conscious, Czolbe now had an answer: Yes, it is, but just a little. However, remaining committed to atheism, he denied that consciousness implied or was in any way connected to a realm of reality beyond the scope of science and empirical inquiry. Moreover, by similarly pushing morality and something he called “purpose” down to the level of fundamental physics, he sought to retain morality and purpose in a world without God.

  Though the materialists saw themselves as preserving consciousness, free will did not fare as well. Büchner trumpeted the view that �
��not only what we are, but also what we do, want, sense, and think…depends on the same natural necessity as the entire construction of the world.”25 And Vogt argued that physiological investigation shows us that “man, as well as animal, is just a machine” and, with characteristic boldness, explained that because tampering with the brain leads to changes in the mind, the proposition that we have free will is refuted.26 Perhaps the move here from premise to conclusion is rather quick, nonetheless, materialism and freedom of the will do make unhappy bedfellows. Regardless of anything else one might say of the ontological status of the mind, inasmuch as it interacts with matter in a deterministic way (for example, insofar as brain damage deterministically leads to damaged mental processes) or inasmuch as mental processes cause actions that occur on a deterministic plane (such as the movements of our bodies), it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the mind is determined.27

  Yet, it is also difficult for materialists to maintain a coherent position on free will. Karl Fischer (1853), a professor of philosophy at Erlangen, brought this out in his criticism of Vogt and other materialists: how is it possible, he asked, to accept both, as the materialists seem to do, that the mind is entirely material and that human beings are masters over their voluntary actions? How is it possible to accept that humans are responsible yet lack freedom? Some of this inconsistency can be straightened out. Vogt was a staunch supporter of freedom in the political realm, especially regarding the separation of church and state, indeed, arguing that the very existence of a religious institution is necessarily an impediment to freedom. Such a call for political freedom can be seen as consistent with deterministic views about the mind and indeed is analogous to the type of freedom present day “compatibilists” argue for in defining freedom as, for example, freedom from external constraints. However, on Fischer’s side, it also seems that some of the motivation for Vogt’s atheism evaporates once we accept determinism. According to Vogt, “every church, without exception, is as such a restriction of the free development of the human spirit, and because I desire a free development of the human spirit in all directions and without limits, I want no restraint on this freedom, and therefore I want no church.”28 Vogt’s motivation for the elimination of the church is grounded in his belief in the value of freedom, yet how, asked Fischer, is this value consistent with Vogt’s determinism? For the materialists, the existence of free will, as it defies any scientific law and was seen as inimical to a scientific picture of the world, must be rejected. The opponents to materialism, however, saw the rejection of free will as undermining moral values and, as they saw faith as a valid route to knowledge, were able to hold on to it. This brings us to the relation between faith and science.

  More so than today, the debate over materialism focused on questions about the limits of science and the role of religion in our understanding of the world. The materialists saw no need for positing a world beyond that which is accessible to our senses, and where our senses leave off, reason, they held, fills in. Even more, at times they professed the view that science has definitely shown that there is no world beyond our senses. Vogt supported his position primarily by pointing out what he saw were the untoward consequences of rejecting it: a devaluation of life here on earth and the maintenance of a political order that depends on the coercive force of the church. The church for him was the primary impediment to human freedom, which (his denial of free will notwithstanding) he saw as necessary for underpinning morality, as essential for underpinning our ability to freely choose the right action.

  Büchner, though he presented similar reasons to reject the idea of suprasensual knowledge, was also fond of another argument for the idea that there is no world beyond that which we come to know through sense experience. His reasoning seems to be that because we are “only a product of this world and of nature itself,” our experience of the world “must mirror and repeat the laws of nature.”29 Critics again pointed to what they saw as inconsistencies in this picture, arguing that although the materialists call for social action and for individuals to right the wrongs of society, their view leaves no room for right and wrong. Frederick Gregory, in his delightful overview of nineteenth-century German materialism, notes that this inconsistency was perhaps brought out best by Mathilde Reichardt in her letter to another of the central proponents of materialism at the time, the physician Jacob Moleschott: “Sin [you claim] lies in that which is unnatural—but where is there unnaturalness in a world in which each effect corresponds with strict logical consequence to an endless series of causes, all of which themselves are based on a natural necessity?”30

  Rudolph Wagner (1854), who saw religious belief as a “new organ of the mind,” argued for the view that faith and science must be kept as two distinct means of knowledge; where the one treads, the other must not go. And like the materialists, Wagner’s arguments were based primarily on the need to avoid the disastrous consequences of rejecting such a view. The natural sciences, he agreed with the materialists, do not suggest an immaterial individual soul, and this is why we need another form of knowledge, for the existence of an immaterial soul is indispensable to the existence of morality (1854, p. 21). Lotze (1852) saw this as “a queer sort of double-entry booking,” and “an unworthy fragmentation of our mental powers” (p. 36). And so the debate went on.

  Though Friedrich Albert Lange in his 1865 History of Materialism considered the Materialismusstreit settled, looking back it seems an open question as to which side won. Lange gives the anti-materialists the upper hand. Summing up Lange’s conclusion, Bertrand Russell, in his 1925 introduction to the book, puts it like this: “there is no good reason to suppose materialism metaphysically true; it is a point of view which has hitherto proved useful in research, and is likely to continue useful wherever new scientific laws are being discovered, but which may well not cover the whole field, and cannot be regarded as definitely true without a wholly unwarranted dogmatism.” (Lange 1950, p. xix) All three of the prominent materialists lost their jobs. And in 1872, the physiologist Emil Du Bois-Reymond took himself to be speaking for the scientific community when he said that there is a fundamental limit to what science can tell us about the world, proclaiming, Ignoramus et ignorabimus (we do not know and we will never know).31

  The contemporary German philosopher, Michael Heidelberger (2007), however, suggests a way in which the materialists were ultimately victorious. Despite what he sees as their excesses, he thinks that it is fortunate that their criticism of Wagner’s double-entry bookkeeping prevailed since it led to what he sees as the general positive attitude toward natural science in Germany. “If the materialists had not won this battle,” as Heidelberger sees it, “the dispute over the role of Darwinism in German secondary education that took place towards the end of the nineteenth century…would not have ended as it did,” adding that “American ‘creationism’ is not taken seriously by anyone—across all circles, and entirely independently of political creed or ideology.”

  We are now quite a distance from what many today think of as standard philosophy of mind, which sees itself as prescinded from religion and politics. Yet, perhaps one lesson we can learn from the Materialismusstreit is that such issues are not always easy to pull apart.

  18.5 EDUARD VON HARTMANN’S THEORY OF THE UNCONSCIOUS

  Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the German novelist Friedrich von Spielhagen captured the intellectual milieu, in describing a Berlin salon as fixated on two topics: Richard Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde, which was thought to probe the depths of the unconscious, and Eduard von Hartmann’s book, Philosophy of the Unconscious, which was thought to explain it. Though discussions of Tristan und Isolde might be overheard today in cafes near Lincoln Center after the curtain goes down, von Hartmann’s book has long faded from the limelight. However, it was certainly in the limelight in the 1870s. Friedrich Nietzsche (1872, p. 262), with characteristic irony, put it this way: “In the entire world one does not speak of the unconscious since, according to its essence, it is u
nknown; only in Berlin does one speak of and know something about it, and explain to us what actually sets it apart.”32 What, then, was all the brouhaha about?

  It is of course not true that in the nineteenth century it was only in Berlin that theories of the unconscious were being discussed in the salons of Germany; and it is also not true that it was only von Hartmann’s work that provoked such discussions. For example, before von Hartmann’s book came out, the zoologist polymath Carl Gustav Carus had been lecturing on the unconscious in Dresden, taking the unconscious as the foundation of his theory of the mind. “The key to understanding the conscious life of the soul lies in the realm of the unconscious,” Carus argued in his 1846 book, Psyche: On the Developmental History of the Soul, a book which von Hartmann commented was written with “senile long-windedness and verbosity.”33 However, it was von Hartmann’s perhaps also longwinded, near 1200 page tome that galvanized the German public, going through nine editions between 1868 and 1884, and through its indirect influence likely played a role in inspiring Freud’s theories about the unconscious, such as those that appeared in 1900 in Interpretation of Dreams.

  What was von Hartmann’s theory of the unconscious? What were so many chattering about in the salons and smoke-filled cafes in Berlin in the 1870s? This is not at all an easy question to answer, as von Hartmann acknowledges in an anonymously published criticism of his own book wherein he faults the author for failing to define the central topic of inquiry.34 Nonetheless, let me attempt to highlight some of what I see as philosophically interesting about his idea of the unconscious as well as his method for investigating it.35